Health care organizations need to generate various types of performance measurement information to determine how well they are progressing over time. Health care organizations typically use this information to determine areas of excellence within their organizations as well as those areas that need improvement. Performance measurement information provides an objective basis for planning and making budgeting decisions. In addition, performance measurement information can be used to demonstrate accountability to the public and to back up claims of quality. Frequently, performance measurement information is provided to accreditation organizations for compliance purposes.
The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), an organization that accredits more than 4,700 hospitals nationwide, requires that participating hospitals provide certain types of performance measurement information. For example, JCAHO requires that participating hospitals provide information regarding patients treated for acute myocardial infarction (AMI). As one example of the type of information that must be provided, hospitals are required to indicate whether an AMI patient without aspirin contraindication received aspirin within 24 hours before or after hospital arrival. Because it is believed that early treatment with aspirin markedly reduces mortality for AMI, JCAHO requires hospitals to report this information.
Currently, performance measurement information must be collected from a myriad of structured and unstructured data sources to comply with accreditation requests. For example, it may be necessary to access numerous different databases, each with its own peculiar format. Worse, physician notes may have to be consulted. These notes usually are nothing more than free text dictations, and it may be very difficult to sift through the notes to gather the necessary information. As a result, the effort taken to collect this information is usually time consuming, expensive, and error prone. Furthermore, usually only a small sample of patient data can be supplied.
Given the importance of collecting accurate performance measurement information, it would be desirable and highly advantageous to provide new techniques for automatically generating performance measurement information for health care organizations.